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20% Of Teens Send Sexually Explicit Photos Of Themselves?
Sure, we've seen all sorts of moral panic-type reports about kids not thinking so much about the consequences of what content they reveal about themselves online, but it still strikes me as a bit unlikely that one in five teens reports sending sexually explicit photos of themselves to others using e …
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New PTSD Cure: Tetris
A newly published study from Oxford University suggests that Tetris is a useful tool for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. The study doesn't seem wholly comprehensive, but the basic idea is that the game engages the mind in such a way that it's essentially too busy working out where to put th …
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YouTube Is Changing How We Think About Video
Whenever we talk about changes impacting the movie industry or the television industry, there's always someone who chimes in with claims about "how will we be able to make $200 million movies any more?" Of course, that question has a few false premises hidden in there -- such as the idea that movie …
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Storage Isn't Much Of An Issue Anymore
The trade group behind the SD memory card format today announced a new standard, called SDXC, that will support memory cards of up to 2 terabytes for devices like digital cameras and cell phones. While the amount of storage that can be crammed into smaller and smaller physical formats continues to g …
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Fox News Uses DMCA To Take Down Videos Used In Commentary
The DMCA has plenty of problems, but one of the more ridiculous is the whole concept of the "notice and takedown" procedure that service providers need to follow. Basically, if a copyright holder feels that its copyright is being infringed, it sends a DMCA notice to the service provider. In order …
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Hired via Facebook? Fired via Facebook
We've seen stories of people being fired over email and even text message before, but now there's a story of a Canadian spa worker fired via Facebook (via Michael Geist). The woman still got dressed and went to in to work that day because she thought it was a joke. Using Facebook seems rather harsh, …
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Obama Fighting For His Blackberry... But May Be Losing
Right after the election, there was plenty of talk about how President-elect Obama would need to give up email just as President Bush did when he took office eight years ago. As plenty of people pointed out at the time, this seems like a pretty silly concept. There should be at least some way to a …
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Taxing ISPs To Fund Newspapers?
In trying to explain why a music tax is a bad idea, I pointed out that if you start with music, you quickly have to start adding pretty much every industry disrupted by the internet. The obvious one is movies, but what about newspapers? They're struggling due to the internet, so why can't they dem …
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Has Our Economy Become Dependant On Bubbles?
I've said in the past that economic bubbles aren't necessarily a bad thing for the overall economy. Afterall, a bubble (at least one in a productive area, such as technology) tends to get a lot of money thrown at some problems, allowing a variety of innovation to take place very rapidly -- effectiv …
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Whisper It, But Maybe Movie Theaters Are Grasping The Need For Change
There have been several signs over the past year that movie theaters are beginning to understand that they need to change their businesses if they are to stay in business -- for example: bigger and better screens, more luxurious environments, richer technology like 3D, even making the pre-show ads m …
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The Dangerous Trend Of Thinking That Ideas Can Be Owned, Sold Or Stolen
An anonymous reader called our attention to a comment reposting some fantastic thinking on the dangerous trend of believing we can own, sell or steal ideas. The comment was in response to a post on Slashdot from a college student worried that his professors were "stealing" his ideas. The commenter …
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Reznor 'Leaks' 400 GB Of High Def Concert Footage
Trent Reznor is making it awfully difficult for me to finish the presentation I'm giving about him next week at MidemNet, because he keeps on doing stuff that should be mentioned in that presentation (I may have to ask the MidemNet folks for more time!). The latest is a post on the NIN.com site (wh …
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OLPC Discovers Economic Reality; Cuts Staff
We've certainly been somewhat harsh on Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC program in the past -- not because we don't like the idea of helping underprivileged kids building technology skills, but because of the way Negroponte has run the project from the beginning. He's acted as if he were the only one who …
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Consumers Union Wants Congress To Delay Digital TV Transition
Now, we all agree that the FCC has screwed up the conversion to digital TV for over-the-air TV watchers, especially with the "coupon" program running out of money. But, it's still pretty ridiculous for Consumers Union to ask Congress to delay the transition (found via Consumers Unions' newly owned …
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Google Street View Helps Find Kidnapped Child
You may remember that a couple months ago an advocacy group was trying to whip up a storm about Google's Street View service. The claim alleged that child predators would use Street View to find where children live and then kidnap them. Well, it turns out that Street View did assist with a kidnappin …
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Despite Whining About Piracy, Secondhand Sales, Video Game Sales At All Time Highs
We've been noting how both the movie industry and the music industry had terrific years in 2008, despite the public perception being passed around by certain legacy companies in both industries that they were being decimated by "pirates." Apparently the same is true in the video game industry as we …
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Storage Isn't Much Of An Issue Any More
The trade group behind the SD memory card format today announced a new standard, called SDXC, that will support memory cards of up to 2 terabytes for devices like digital cameras and cell phones. While the amount of storage that can be crammed into smaller and smaller physical formats continues to g …
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Trusted Computing Not So Trustworthy
As pretty much anyone in computer security recognizes, any bit of "secure" computing is only secure for a limited period of time. Eventually, the security will be cracked. Yet, we still keep hearing about expectations for some new technologies to solve all our security problems. For example, we'v …
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EFF's Patent Busting Project Scores Another Hit
While it's taken quite some time, the EFF has had considerable success with its project to bust ten awful patents. The latest is that the USPTO has agreed to re-examine a patent from Seer Systems involving online music. Again, the really tragic thing about all of this is that the EFF started this …
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Negative Review On Yelp Leads To Defamation Lawsuit
There have been plenty of stories about companies suing people for posting negative reviews about their business practices, and it still seems like a really dumb thing to do -- as in the end all it does is call a lot more attention to the negative review. That's what appears to be happening with a …
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